MY MOTHER

Sarah Adragna

Sonnets are Full of Love

Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

Sonnets are full of love, and this my tome
Has many sonnets: so here now shall be
One sonnet more, a love sonnet, from me
To her whose heart is my heart's quiet home,
To my first Love, my Mother, on whose knee
I learnt love-lore that is not troublesome;
Whose service is my special dignity,
And she my lodestar while I go and come
And so because you love me, and because
I love you, Mother, I have woven a wreath
Of rhymes where with to crown your honored name:
In you not fourscore years can dim the flame
Of love, whose blessed glow transcends the laws
Of time and change and mortal life and death.

My mother has been on my mind a great deal these days. This coming Friday, October 30th, would have been her 90th birthday. She has been gone now for nearly six years. It hardly seems possible. I have missed her in so many ways, at so many times, and for so many different reasons. There has been much I've wanted to share with her, especially the birth of Jonel's two girls, Iris and Elsa. I recall after coming home from the hospital just after Iris was born, what I wanted most to do was to call my mother.

No matter how old we are, we remain the child. No matter the passing of one's mother, we remain her child. I need her in countless ways in my life, and though I ache inside, she is there for me each time. I once heard a lovely song a mother sang to her child with a line something like this, "you are my flesh, my blood, my bones...", and somehow that has comforted me. What could be more true, I am my mother's flesh and blood and bones, and she lives in me.

We gathered at one of the granddaughter's weddings several years ago.


My siblings and I at my mother's 75th birthday celebration.



For my mother's 75th birthday celebration, among other things, I wrote her a poem. I felt compelled to do so again. This is not a sonnet, nor does it compare to Rossetti, but mother, it is for you:

Is there any part of me
untouched by you?
When I chance
to glance into a mirror
it is you I see.
Not me.

I rue I did not take more time
throughout the years...
to come to know your inner thoughts,
or at least to be more interested
in them;
to come to know your deeper thoughts about
the world;
and love;
and peace;
and war;
and hope;
and God.

I never asked.
You never told.

As I've been shaped
and formed by you
I wonder if my deepest
thoughts
have, too?

There is much of me
that needs repair,
or change
or betterment;
still, when the good of me
comes through
you are there
in thought and word and deed.